The Legacy of Steve Jobs

Click through for a brief look at the incredible impact Steve Jobs has had on the world of computing as we know it.

While we have often focused on Steve Jobs' public roles and his capability to present products as highlighted in “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs” — a book Rob Enderle thinks every aspiring or existing CEO should read — we forget that he also played the role of virtual customer. You can see the difference in market performance between products he "got," like the iPod, and products he didn’t, like AppleTV (Steve wasn’t a fan of TV).

Most technology companies bring out products based on what engineers, who have little real contact with customers, want to do. And most CEOs let them do it. At Apple, Jobs took a personal interest and assured products could be easily pitched and sold, and could be enjoyed by him and his family. He was a super focus group of one and, better than any focus group, he was hard to manipulate.